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Internationalization of APSA: Why? How?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2004

Ashu Varshney
Ashu Varshney
Affiliation:
University of Michigan and Chair, International Committee
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Extract

In a meeting of APSA's international committee in September 2003,APSA President Susanne Rudolph suggested the need for a “mutualde-parochialization” in our knowledge practices. She meant a closerinteraction between American and non-American political scientistsand a greater cross-fertilization of their substantive andmethodological concerns. Margaret Levi, the President-elect of APSA,also emphasized the need for a greater internationalization ofAmerican political science, with special emphasis paid to theso-called international public realm.

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PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , July 2004, pp. 533 - 538
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© 2004 by the American Political Science Association

In a meeting of APSA's international committee in September 2003, APSA President Susanne Rudolph suggested the need for a “mutual de-parochialization” in our knowledge practices. She meant a closer interaction between American and non-American political scientists and a greater cross-fertilization of their substantive and methodological concerns. Margaret Levi, the President-elect of APSA, also emphasized the need for a greater internationalization of American political science, with special emphasis paid to the so-called international public realm.

This note is a response to their concerns. It incorporates the comments made by the International Committee in its meeting on January 23, 2004, held at APSA's national office in Washington D.C.,1

The current members of the International Committee are: Karen Beckwith, John Odell, Allan Rosenbaum, Richard Simeon, and Toni-Michelle Travis. Rosenbaum was unable to participate in the January meeting, but commented later on our ideas. Timothy Colton, the previous chair of the International Committee, was in attendance by special invitation. Michael Brintnall, Bahram Rajaee, Sylvia Bronson, and Linda Lopez represented APSA in the discussion. I thank all of the participants, as well as Susanne Rudolph and Margaret Levi, for their comments on earlier drafts of this memo.

as well as the subsequent suggestions made by Susanne Rudolph and Margaret Levi. Our aim at this point is to submit this draft to the Administrative Committee for feedback—before a formal document is placed for the consideration of the Council in its meeting on April 17. The final document, if approved by the Council, will constitute a new mandate for the international committee.

In the discussion below, I first discuss why internationalization of APSA is desirable. It is followed by the international committee's understanding of how it might best be carried out.

Why Internationalization?

Should APSA be concerned only with our U.S./North American colleagues, or should it widen its search of ideas, methods, concerns, and collaborations? Will American political science and American political scientists be better off if we pursue internationalization more vigorously? These questions require thought and reflection.International members already constitute about 10% of the total membership, about 1,400 APSA members. Predictably, the proportions are higher in some subfields, especially comparative politics, than in others. As explained by Michael Brintnall at the January meeting of the International Committee, legally speaking, APSA is not a national, but a dues-based organization, responsible to its members wherever they might exist. Thanks to a new survey conducted by APSA last fall, we now have a better sense of the needs and aspirations of our international members.

Opinions differ on whether an association should, or can, pay special attention to every particular group of its membership. That is not our main argument in favor of greater internationalization. In our view, a more compelling argument—and one that we advance below—is that internationalization is mutually beneficial. Whatever its benefits to international political scientists, a more internationalized APSA will be rewarding for political scientists based in the U.S./North America as well.

To illustrate this latter point, let us recall what greater sensitivity to non-American political materials and intellectual interventions of political scientists with non-American backgrounds have already done to theory building in our discipline. Many examples can be cited from the last few decades. Consider just a few, necessarily selective, instances.

Democratic Theory

In the 1950s and 1960s, after the influential scholarship of Seymour Martin Lipset, democratic theorists argued that democracies were possible only in wealthy countries. The stability of democracy in poorer countries (India, Botswana, Costa Rica, Trinidad, Papua New Guinea, and Mauritius, to name a few) has seriously challenged this orthodoxy. The major new formulation, developed by Adam Przeworski et al. (Democracy and Development, Cambridge, 2000), is based on a global dataset, including developing countries. It rests on a distinction between emergence and survival: democracies can emerge at any level of income, but the odds that they will survive at low levels of income are low. Other scholars of democracy, such as Arend Lijphart, have also extensively used non-American materials. In fact, Lijphart's consociational theory was originally based on the Dutch experience, and was only later extended further.

Theories of Nationalism

One of the most influential works in the field of ethnicity and nationalism is Imagined Communities (Verso, 1983) by Benedict Anderson, a Southeast Asia specialist, whose basic ideas emerged from Asia and Latin America (“Creole Pioneers”). Emphasizing the role of technology and vernacular forms of communication in the formation of nations, Anderson showed how all nations were imagined and constructed in modern times. This argument has led to a dramatic reordering of the literature on nationalism in Europe as well, where scholarly discussions of nationalism, untouched by these ideas, had first emerged. Linda Colley's Britons (Yale, 1992) is a good example of the latter.

More instances can be cited. The recent emphasis on the role of civil society in democracies was spurred by Robert Putnam's examination of Italian materials in the 1970s and 1980s. The theory of the developmental state had its roots in the East Asian government-business relations of the 1970s and 1980s, highlighted in the works, among others, of non-American scholars such as Robert Wade. The idea of bureaucratic authoritarianism was born in Latin America and noticed first in Guillermo O'Donnell's writings. Making a major impact on the work on rationality and politics, the rational-moral debate on peasant behavior between Samuel Popkin and James Scott in the late 1970s was based on Southeast Asian empirical materials.

Finally, Samuel Barnes and Max Kaase's cross-national study of mass participation (Political Action, Sage, 1979), Barbara Nelson and Najma Chowdhury's collection, Women and Politics Worldwide (Yale, 1994), involving 61 scholars from 43 different countries, and Russell Dalton and Manfred Kuechler's volume Challenging the Political Order (Oxford, 1990) are products of international collaborative efforts that have provided a foundation for cross-national research on citizen-state linkages across a wide range of political systems, and on the interaction between conventional and unconventional citizen participation in electoral politics and social movements

These examples make it clear that a systematic engagement with non-American materials makes our discipline, our political understandings, and our theories better. The era of globalization and its concomitant communication revolution, by producing a remarkable flow of ideas, people, technology, arms, goods, and capital across geographical borders, and the post-9/11 shocks to the international system, are making the need to understand the larger political world still more urgent and desirable. Even U.S. politics longer remains untouched by rather distant questions, such as why the Taliban and Al Qaeda prospered in Afghanistan and Pakistan and whether those conditions can re-emerge there or elsewhere. Left in recent years on the margins of the discipline, such questions have become all too global in their political implications and can only be ignored at our peril. The remarkable political and economic rise of China, with India not far behind, and the steps towards democracy and market-oriented economies in Eastern Europe and Russia are also matters of great international political significance. Despite the global thrust of the last two decades, the empirical possibility of a thoroughly Americanized world is not a serious one. Do we need a fuller engagement with non-U.S./North American scholars to make a better sense of how these developments are changing our political universe? Will a better political science, responding to changes in the real world, develop more easily if scholarly experiences, not simply research concerns, are systematically broadened and globalized?

All scholars, to a substantial extent, are shaped by their training. As arguments within the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences show, inherited or institutionally practiced methods, perspectives, and approaches make one more naturally inclined toward a certain regime of facts, toward a specific mode of reasoning, toward a particular style of argumentation. Systematic encounters, exposures, collaborations across trainings, methods, and perspectives not only present exciting intellectual challenges, worth undertaking on their own, but also bring greater depth, authenticity, and relevance to knowledge and theory-building.2

Humility is an additional—and not an entirely insignificant—intellectual gain. It should also be noted that several scholars cited above explicitly acknowledge the contribution of the more locally rooted scholars and/or knowledge to the evolution of their theories. Putnam mentions Leonardi and Nanetti; Anderson and Scott's works repeatedly cite Asian scholars; Pzreworski's team was multinational; Lijphart has a Dutch background; O'Donnell lived in Argentina for much of his life, with his Argentinean experiences in the 1960s shaping his theories enormously.

But why burden APSA with the task of encouraging border-crossings? Why can't such endeavors be left to individual scholars or universities? Individuals and institutions, after all, can form partnerships, if they so choose. Two arguments come to mind. When it comes to collaborations with foreign scholars, not all individuals and institutions are equally well-placed. Second, after 9/11, movement of individual scholars across borders is becoming increasingly difficult. An organization like APSA can attack both problems more effectively than can individual scholars. APSA represents a broader constituency.

In summary, the following arguments support the idea and desirability of a more internationalized APSA:

  1. Greater internationalization will benefit APSA members and their scholarship by enriching our theories and research intuitions and by broadening our perspectives. More international collaboration is desirable, as is the freer movement of scholars.
  2. APSA's approval of this idea would be a good signaling device, with important implications for the profession.
  3. Individuals can strike collaborative exchanges, but such opportunities are not equally accessible to all, and even those who benefit from particular exchanges would benefit from more generalized opportunities. An APSAmediated crossing of borders will be more effective and beneficial than would leaving such partnerships solely up to individuals or departments.
  4. Post-9/11, crossing borders has become increasingly difficult, thus further hindering the ability of individual scholars to form fruitful international exchanges. APSA's role will be highly significant in the new international atmosphere.

How Should We Promote Internationalization?

  • Changes at the Annual Meeting: (1) Set up an “international night” on the Thursday of the Meeting to facilitate network-building and to promote comparative discussions; (2) recommend to the Program Committee that an annual plenary session be established on a matter of international salience with a major public figure as our featured speaker, or a presentation by a major scholar working on an issue of great international importance. Examples are: Nelson Mandela on South African democratic transition; Bill Clinton or Dominica de Villepin on American foreign policy after 9/11; Lee Kuan Yew on whether Asian, or non-Western, democracy must be an illiberal democracy; Amartya Sen on democratic theory for the 21st century; Joseph Stiglitz on the right kind of globalization; Jeffrey Sachs on why Sub-Saharan Africa's development problems have serious international implications; Jurgen Habermas on the European Union and the Nation-State; Paul Krugman on the migration of service sector jobs out of the U.S.; Charles Taylor on democracies and multiculturalism, etc.
  • Funding: The committee supports (1) increasing the “International Scholars” funds targeting non-OECD scholars to receive the substantial proportion of the funding increase; (2) creating a new program for international scholars to stay beyond the four days of the Annual Meeting for research and networking purposes. In support of (1), the committee would like to make five grants of $3,000 each for foreign scholars to attend APSA annual meetings, and in support of (2), five grants of $2,000 each. A grand total of $25,000 for the two programs would not constitute a significant increase in the APSA funding already available for the International Scholars Program, while at the same time symbolically demonstrating that APSA is serious about giving greater preference to its international activities and a stronger mandate to its International Committee. Once some additional funds are available from APSA, the committee will work to attract greater program funding in the future, essentially by approaching individuals and foundations for possible contributions.
  • Public Presence: To support Margaret Levi's efforts to increase the public presence of the discipline, the committee would (1) work with her to promote policy-relevant research where and as appropriate; (2) collaborate with APSA's existing Committee on Difference and Equality in Developing Countries; and (3) select from each annual meeting 5 to 10 papers that are important for the international public realm, and distribute a press release (as well as use prior contacts) to the editors of the New York Times, the Economist, and the Financial Times. These periodicals have been selected for their seriousness and global reach.
  • Web site revisions: (1) Offer onlineonly access to APSA journals for international members at a cheaper rate; (2) Ask/Help the Organized Sections to put their section journals online after a six-month lag. The six-month lag ensures that the revenues of organized section do not decrease, even as the ideas discussed in section newsletters enjoy greater international access.
  • Formation of partnerships with the British Policy Studies Association, Japanese Political Science Association, and Canadian Political Science Association: Create a resource to help other countries strengthen or build national associations, focusing particularly on non-OECD countries. These three associations have been selected due to their longstanding working relationships with APSA.
  • Governance: (1) Ask that at least one representative on the Council come from outside the U.S.; (2) recommend that the APSA president and Nominating Committee use a principle of proportionality regarding the international dimension in all appointments, while ensuring that this does not alter proportionality goals in other forms, such as gender. We certainly do not want a quota for international members on each committee, but we think more international members on APSA committees on the whole would represent international concerns more effectively.
  • International Committee Makeup: Ask that the International Committee always have two international members.
  • Membership: Examine various options including, (1) allowing departments to be members of Organized Sections; (2) creating new individual and departmental international membership categories with reduced benefits and lower prices; (3) researching impact of eliminating the international postage fee. Individuals in non-OECD countries often find it financially difficult to subscribe individually, even at the lower income-based subscription rates that APSA allows. These individuals can benefit from, and contribute to, our discussions if they can access our publications through departmental subscriptions. The International Committee will work closely with APSA staff to strike a balance between APSA's revenue needs and its goal of increasing international membership.
  • Organized Sections: Ask the Sections (1) to put their journals online for easier international access; (2) to allow international departments from non-OECD countries to join Sections; (3) to be more aware of the impact of increases in section dues on international membership; and (4) to help the committee set up individual liaisons to IPSA research groups, as well as to other national associations.
  • PROL (Political Research Online): The committee agreed to extend the invitation to participate to other national associations, in order to facilitate research feedback and themebased international networking.
  • Publications: The committee supports (1) bolstering international submissions to APSA journals; (2) creating a “special edition” of Perspectives on Politics or PS on a specific theme, such as different traditions of studying politics, solicited directly from the membership; (3) touching base with Perspectives and PS editors on international participation and possibilities for special editions; and (4) considering and reporting on the international implications of the upcoming review of the APSA publishing agenda.
  • Teaching and Learning: The committee will research the possibility of holding the Teaching and Learning Conference overseas and of building a connection with EPSnet.

APSA-PSA Strengthen Ties

The latest iteration of the bilateral exchange between APSA and the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom took place in April. Bahram Rajaee, director of Institutional Research and Support, attended the PSA's Annual Conference on behalf of APSA. The Conference took place from April 5–8 at the University of Lincoln in Lincolnshire. The PSA was founded in 1950 and is the leading association for the study of political science in the United Kingdom. Its membership currently stands at approximately 1,400, an all-time high.

From L to R: Bahram Rajaee, Paul Furlong (chair, PSA External Relations Committee), unknown, Wyn Grant (chair, PSA Executive Commitee), Neil Collins (editor, PSA News).

The PSA is currently engaged in a number of interesting and important activities in addition to its member services, annual conference, and the publication of four journals (British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Political Studies, Politics, and Political Studies Review). In the past year, these have included:

  • Lobbying the British government for reforms regarding the manner in which research funds are distributed across departments;
  • Holding a high-profile annual awards lunch each November to recognize the achievements of academics, journalists, and other contributors to the study and conduct of politics. 2003 award winners included Robin Cook (Parliamentarian of the Year), Ken Livingstone (Politician of the Year), Lords Plant and Smith (Lifetime Achievement in Political Studies), Polly Toynbee (Journalist of the Year), and Jeremy Paxman (Political Broadcast of the Year);
  • A robust, ongoing effort to increase the public profile of the Association and political science research through media relations workshops for members and an active press release campaign.

APSA and PSA are discussing ways in which to expand their relationship, including collaboration on more broad-ranging sessions at the APSA Annual Meeting and participation in PROL—the pre-publication server for political science conference papers (www.politicalscienceresearch.org). PSA will be co-sponsoring a reception in honor of APSA's centenary celebrations at the APSA Annual Meeting in Chicago. For more information on the PSA or the APSA-PSA relationship, visit the PSA web site at www.psa.ac.uk, or contact Bahram Rajaee ().

The APSA Committee on International Political Science has prepared a statement for review by the Council regarding steps the Association might take to strengthen international partnerships and enhance cross-national perspectives across the Association. The Committee's statement lays out a rationale for this effort and recommends a series of immediate and future action steps. The APSA Council voted unanimously at its spring meeting in Chicago this April to enthusiastically endorse the statement. The Council increased funding for international travel to the annual conference for scholars from non-OECD countries, reduced foreign postage fees for APSA journals, and called for greater attention to ways to increase external funding for international initiatives.

This summer APSA staff will examine a comprehensive range of actions regarding membership options, the creative use of technology, and funding that would allow APSA to offer more tailored services for overseas members. For more information on the Committee on International Political Science or related APSA activities, please contact Bahram Rajaee (), director of Institutional Research and Support.

Figure 0

From L to R: Bahram Rajaee, Paul Furlong (chair, PSA External Relations Committee), unknown, Wyn Grant (chair, PSA Executive Commitee), Neil Collins (editor, PSA News).

Figure 1

APSA International Membership